Plains veteran self-publishes war memoirs

Bob Williamson had never seen the sea before he enlisted in the Navy on June 20, 1942. He was seventeen and living in Eldora, Iowa. Population 3,500.

“Join the Navy and see the world,” he said. “That had a ring to it.”

Though Williamson had never laid an eye on the ocean, he still developed a healthy love of ships.

“I joined the Navy because I thought I liked ships,” Williamson said. He immediately developed a connection with his craft. “They call ships ‘her,’ and my feeling on it is that’s the only girl you’ve got when you’re out there.”

Now, 63 years later, Williamson has self-published the story of his years in WWII. Called “A Destroyer’s Diary,” his book details his journey aboard the U.S.S. Cogswell while he served in the South Pacific. Willamson kept his journal in a ship’s stores clerk book. According to him, the Cogswell was the first U.S. naval ship to enter Tokyo Bay.

Though Williamson didn’t fight in one of the most famous battles of the South Pacific — the war to capture the beaches of Okinawa — he said he saw the city after it fell to U.S. soldiers.

“You could smell, like burned timber after a fire,” he explained. He also met some of the Japanese, who he said seemed more relieved than anything, relieved that the fighting was in the past and that the U.S. soldiers hadn’t killed everyone.

The Cogswell was part of the TF 38 and 58 armada. Williamson said the armada did so much damage to the Japanese fleets that the Japanese commanders assumed there must have been two sets of ships, not one. The U.S. obliged their confusion by referring to the group as two separate entities in messages they knew the Japanese could decode.

Williamson kept his diary in a ship store’s clerk book. “A Destroyer’s Diary” is written in the simple, military log style its author maintained as a combat and communications officer. One entry reads: “January 29-30 [1944] participated in the Marshall Islands’ campaign. We sank a Jap gun boat and participated in the bombardment of enemy objectives in Marshall Islands.”

Another entry, a few paragraphs later: “February 17 was my 19th birthday.”

Williamson said the military has kept his style simple.

“To this day, I don’t chitchat and speak about the weather or the weekend,” he explained. Even entries about destroying enemy ships seem stark.

Not much to say about destroying enemy ships, said Williamson. “You shoot a shell and they sink.”

Later, as the war drew to a close, Williamson began to add more detail to his diaries.

“Since we received word from Frisco that the war was over many Jap planes have been ‘shot down in a friendly sort of way’ in defense of the 3rd fleet,” he wrote in an entry dated August 15, 1945. “As far as the fleet is concerned, the war’s not over yet.”

Williamson only rarely refers to his own emotions.

“As far as having respect for the Japs none of the crew has any,” he wrote July 12, 1945. “Shooting slugs into a Jap would produce no more emotion in us than if we were firing those same slugs into a fence post.”

Williamson said that, much of the time onboard, his typical emotion was boredom.

“There were sometimes moments when you were bored stiff because there’s nothing going on,” he said. “No popcorn, no movies, no dates. We left all that at home.”

Writing letters wasn’t much fun. Williamson said the army’s censorship prevented him from writing much more than, “Dear honey, how are you? I am fine.”

While life could be dull, Williamson also suffered moments of terror and tragedy. He saw one crew mate, nicknamed “Gramps” hit by a wave that broke his spine. At 37 years of age, Gramps had been one of the oldest people on the Cogswell.

Williamson hopes to write a second book later which will add more narration and color to his log, but he wanted to finish “A Destroyer’s Diary” first.

“My wife and kids thought I ought to get it all down in black and white before I cashed in,” he explained.

Williamson suffers from a variety of health problems and knows that he might not be able to finish his second, more thorough book. For now, he’s happy to have finished a project decades in the making.

“It gives me a great sense of relief because I finally accomplished what I wanted to do 60 years ago,” he said.

Williamson will be signing copies of “A Destroyers’ Diary” at the Plains Library Aug. 28 from 6-7 p.m.